![]() And his life was only going to become better and better. And he really believed he kind of made it. He moved his parents from their village to Beijing, which was a big success in Chinese culture. gao zhibinĪnd he got married, and he had a daughter. He was making about $30,000 a year, which was pretty good money for anybody in China at that time. So he basically becomes a small-scale, almost, developer. And he leased a plot of land on the outskirts of Beijing and built an apartment building, and rented it out to migrant workers. So after a few years, he started working for, kind of, like a human resources company, recruiting factory workers just like him. You can sense it when you’re talking to him. gao zhibinĪnd he has a lot of street smarts. So he went to work at an electronics factory in Beijing, making about $300 a month, which was a fortune for him. But he dreamed about the world outside his village. he worked hard labor, making very little money. And he didn’t finish middle school, and - gao zhibin He said he grew up having, like, only two meals with meat a year. He was born in China’s eastern province, Shandong, in a poor village. And he thought he realized the Chinese dream and ended up on the Darién Gap. It might be better if I can give you an example - a man I met. And so I’ve been really interested in finding out, why are they doing this? michael barbaroĪnd what do you come to understand about why thousands of Chinese migrants are making this journey? What explains it? li yuan And actually, hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens left the country last year.Īnd the Chinese migrants who cross the Darién Gap represent those who are going to the most extreme lengths to leave the country. But in recent years, the numbers of people leaving China have again started to go up. co-opted the term, and it became the Chinese dream, and many Chinese bought into that. And then, the Communist Party kind of - michael barbaro Yeah, the American dream - we grew up watching Hollywood movies. ![]() michael barbaroĪs a play on the American dream, right? li yuan And about 80 percent of Chinese who studied abroad - people like me - went back to China, because why leave China, right? You could have Chinese dream. And then, as the economy grew, life became much better, the opportunities were abundant, and there were, like, hundreds of millions of Chinese middle-class.Īnd by 2012, very few Chinese were leaving. A lot of people were leaving, trying very hard to leave China in 1980s, when China was a very poor country. michael barbaroĪnd if we step back and look at the history, China used to be a big country for migration. Yeah, that’s more than the previous 10 years combined. Last year, in 2023, 24,000 Chinese crossed the Southern border. li yuanĪnd how many Chinese migrants are we talking about here? li yuan They are not, in most of the public’s imagination, in the same boat as the migrants from any of the countries we think of where people are fleeing violence and poverty and taking this very dangerous route, the Darién Gap. But what felt so unusual for Chinese people taking this journey is that unlike these other groups, these Chinese are fleeing the world’s second-largest economy. I saw all these videos on social media of Chinese people crossing the US border with Mexico by taking the route, what we call the Darién Gap.Īnd most people taking the Darién Gap are from Venezuela, Ecuador, and Haiti. And in early 2023, I started seeing something quite surprising for me. You know, I watch a lot of Chinese social media for my job. Li, you write about China for the “Times.” Tell us how it is that you first came to this story. My colleague Li Yuan on how that crisis is now showing up at the US-Mexico border. Today, a crisis of confidence is brewing inside China, where the heavy hand of the government is turning true believers in the Chinese dream into skeptics willing to flee the country. michael barbaroįrom “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email with any questions. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. This transcript was created using speech recognition software. Find out whether you have matched all the numbers needed to win a prize.Transcript How China Broke One Man’s Dreams Gao Zhibin is among the thousands of migrants disillusioned with their home country who have risked the perilous crossing into the United States. The results for all three draws per day are shown in the table. Draws take place at 1pm, 6pm and 9pm every day, with three winning numbers selected between 0 and 9.
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